Learning microsoft power bi transforming data into insights

In the previous chapter, we went into detail to help you understand the UI functions of the Report and Data views. This chapter deals with the UI of Power Query and the Model view. By the end of this chapter, we’ll have imported the mockup class data into a Power BI Desktop file and used that data to demonstrate some of the basic capabilities of Power Query for data manipulation and shaping. In our discussion of the Model view, we’ll demonstrate what relationships are in a data model and what they do. Finally, we’ll go through the data and actively try things with it. If you’re a hands-on learner, I highly recommend you take the sample data and follow along with me to try to replicate the steps and results.

Learning Microsoft Power BI

Transforming Data into Insights

Jeremey Arnold

Learning Microsoft Power BI

by Jeremey Arnold

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978-1-098-11284-4

[LSI]

I dedicate this book to my wife, Katherine, and my children, Elainamia andMakayla They are my constant source of encouragement and joy

I was a senior at Ball State University when one of my professors, Dr

James McClure, and I were discussing classic challenges to the perfectlycompetitive market model We were having a back-and-forth, and

throughout our entire discussion, I kept bringing all the critiques back to a

single problem: asymmetric information Asymmetric information is the

condition in which one party knows more about the topic at hand than theother party, to the point where they can use that for some sort of advantage

We live in a world in which Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and othersknow so much about you that they can try to figure out what you want

before you know you even want it However, you have access to that sameinformation In the information age, we don’t have an asymmetric

information problem as much as we have an asymmetric comprehension

problem What we historically haven’t had is the ability to process data inthe same way Or at least, we didn’t until recently

Tools that would allow you to aggregate information at scale were

historically tools of organizations that could afford complicated investmentsinto data platforms that the ordinary person could neither comprehend norafford However, today there exists a piece of software that puts one of, if

not the most powerful analytics engines ever made into your hands with an

initial investment cost of zero dollars and zero cents We have never beenmore awash in data, and that data is more available to people like you and

me than it ever has been in human history

Microsoft’s Power BI platform gives users a tool to aggregate incrediblylarge amounts of data to discover insights that can give you just as much, ifnot more, information than those around you Whether you are using it forpersonal reasons or as an organization looking to get a competitive edge inthe marketplace by making data more meaningful within your company,there has never been a lower-cost entry to data processing with the ease ofuse of Power BI Desktop

Microsoft has spent years working with companies all over the world on atechnology for complicated data analytics Power BI is built on that

technology, and Microsoft is literally putting all that know-how into yourhands Data is the great equalizer It’s not just about having more or less of

it It’s about using the data you do have effectively

Organizations all over the world collect more data than you and I could evercomprehend in a lifetime, and yet they do nothing with it because they have

no idea how to use it, and they find themselves losing market share to

smaller competitors who are using the data they have effectively

Nonprofits are using Power BI to do data analysis that makes the world abetter place to live, on issues from conservation to climate change to

healthcare access Citizen data analysts are using publicly available datasets

to uncover financial misbehavior and to double-check results from dataprovided by organizations and governments around the world If the ability

to process and make data meaningful is truly the great equalizer of the

information age, then Power BI is a tool that gives you the ability to sit at atable and look giants in the eye

You might be an accountant looking to automate complicated data cleaningprocesses for regulatory purposes and want a tool to quickly visualize profitand loss statements You might be a citizen data analyst looking for a tool tohelp crunch millions of records of data for a personal project You could be

a data scientist looking for a tool to accelerate adoption of your work byend users If you are a person who works with data in any capacity andwant to get more out of that data than you ever have, then Power BI is anecosystem that you should have exposure to

I wrote this book because, first, I’m super passionate about data being usedeffectively and I truly believe that everyone in the 21st century can interactwith data in some way to improve, either professionally or personally

Second, Power BI has been a vehicle for me to better understand all sorts ofimportant data concepts, and I think those ideas are important to

accomplishing that first goal How do we put data from different sourcestogether? How do we deal with tables that are too large for Microsoft

Excel? How do we target specific groups or slices of a group for analysis

effectively? How do we visualize those results to make them

comprehensible to our audience? My early career was spent deep in thebowels of corporate finance, and if I had Power BI then, I would have saved

so much time and heartache in manually manipulating data and doing

simple groupings and pivot tables

Our 21st-century data requires a 21st-century tool to unlock it I believePower BI is the best tool to do that It can store the data It can analyze thedata It has the reach to be available to anyone who uses Windows No otherdata visualization or exploration tool can make that claim, and that’s whyI’m excited you’re picking up this book And I hope you find your datajourney as fulfilling as mine has been and continues to be

Navigating This Book

This book is organized roughly as follows:

Chapter 1, “Intro to Power BI”, provides a brief history of Microsoft’sprevious business intelligence efforts and how those products haveevolved into the Power BI we know today Alongside that, it goes intodetail about how Power BI works under the hood, in terms of how itstores and queries that data

Chapter 2, “The Report and Data Views”, and Chapter 3, “Importingand Modeling Our Data”, introduce portions of the Power BI userinterface, including how to navigate the various ribbons and how tobring your data into Power BI for analysis

Chapter 4, “Let’s Make Some Pictures (Visualizing Data 101)”, and

Chapter 5, “Aggregations, Measures, and DAX”, go into basic

principles of visualization and utilizing data aggregations

Chapter 6, “Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together: From Raw Data toReport”, is a walk-through using the work of the previous chapters to

go from nothing in Power BI to a fully functional report page

Chapter 7, “Advanced Reporting Topics in Power BI”, discusses someadvanced analytics topics in Power BI, including AI visuals and what-

if analysis

Chapter 8, “Introduction to the Power BI Service”, and Chapter 9,

“Licensing and Deployment Tips”, introduce the Power BI service, thecloud-based platform for sharing reports and insights

Chapter 10, “Third-Party Tools”, introduces useful third-party tools toaccelerate or ease future development

Appendix A, “Commonly Used DAX Expressions”, and Appendix B,

“Some Favorite Custom Visuals”, provide examples of DAX functionsfor you to take and modify for your own future data, and a valuable list

of some of my favorite custom visuals and their various functionalities,respectively

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

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Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank everyone at Onebridge who believed in me and gave me thespace to write this text I want to give a special thanks to Sheryl Ricci forhelping me with internal editing Thanks to the book’s technical reviewers

—Bradley Nielsen, Belinda Allen, and Bill McLellan I want to thank theteam at O’Reilly who gave me this opportunity, especially Michelle Smith,Jeff Bleiel, and Chris Faucher Finally, I want to thank you, the reader, fortaking the time to pick up this text and give it a chance.

Chapter 1 Intro to Power BI

You’re a data person You understand your data You know how

spreadsheets work But there’s so much data to process, and your

spreadsheets aren’t cutting it.

You need a way to visualize the data and share it with business users so that they can see the analytics, understand the data as you do, and even

manipulate the visualizations with little to no training.

If that’s why you’re looking at this book, you made the right move.

Microsoft Power BI is exactly what you need This book will show you how

to get up to speed quickly—so quickly that you’ll be building and publishing reports that will wow your colleagues and make your mom proud.

Microsoft Power BI is a data analytics and visualization tool powerful

enough for the most demanding data scientists but accessible enough foreveryday use by anyone needing to get more from their data

In the beginning, back when life was simpler (in 2011), Power BI was just asimple piece of desktop software But it isn’t anymore It’s an entire

business intelligence ecosystem that can fit into multiple diverse technologystacks

This chapter introduces Microsoft Power BI, discusses the entire Power BIfamily of products, provides an overview of how Power BI works, and

looks at what distinguishes it from other similar tools By the end of thischapter, you’ll:

Know what components fit in the Power BI ecosystem and why

What Is Power BI?

Power BI is both a piece of software and a larger ecosystem of products.

Usually when people throw out the term “Power BI,” it’s in reference to thedesktop authorship software However, when discussing how most peoplewill (visually) share the fruits of their work with others, it’s done in thecontext of the Power BI service, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution thathosts Power BI datasets and reports that can be used by others who haveaccess

Even beyond these two features, a wide variety of products in the familyallow you to embed reports into websites and other applications, view

reports on your mobile device, and even have your own version of the SaaSsolution on premises

This book focuses on Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service sincethey are your most basic and valuable building blocks

Power BI Desktop is a tool for data investigation and visualization.

Analysts can take data and create interactive reports that enable end users togarner insights that were previously buried In finance, you might use

Power BI to automate the generation of profit and loss (P&L) statements oranalyze costs over time In construction, you could use Power BI to identifyvariances in times to complete projects based on team composition or

geographical factors In retail, you might identify which of your productsare the most successful, while pinpointing which ones might be on the cusp

of taking off if given a bit more of a push via a what-if analysis

According to Microsoft at the 2021 Business Applications Summit, 97% ofthe Fortune 500 uses Power BI in some capacity That means it’s a

technology you can trust putting your time and effort into, especially ifyou’re looking for the kind of insight that transforms your enterprise Or in

my case, it’s the excuse to build a Pokédex for my daughter Sometimes youjust really want to be the best, like no one ever was

Power BI Components

Power BI today consists of a wide variety of products that allow users tocreate and consume reports from your data According to Microsoft (at thetime of publishing), here are all the components that make up the Power BIfamily of products:

Power BI Desktop

Power BI service

Power BI Mobile

Power BI Report Builder

Power BI Report Server on premises

Power BI Embedded

There is much to unpack in these products, but the main focus of this book

is on the first two components We’ll spend most of our time learning

Power BI Desktop because that’s the foundation you need; it’s what thewhole ecosystem is built around Then we’ll discuss the Power BI service inmore detail toward the end because you’re going to need that knowledge topublish (and then share) your amazing work that’ll make you the envy ofyour department

With that in mind, a quick overview of these components will be useful inthe future, so here they are:

Power BI Desktop

A free application you install on a local computer that you can use toconnect to, transform, and visualize data This is the building block forall the other portions of the Power BI ecosystem

Power BI service

An online SaaS solution that lets end users share reports created in

Power BI Desktop or Power BI Report Builder with users across an

organization (In case you’re wondering, the “s” in “service” is

lowercase on purpose; that’s just how Microsoft named it.)

Power BI Mobile

A set of applications for Windows, iOS, and Android that allows endusers to view reports in the Power BI service from their mobile deviceswithout having to use a web browser

Power BI Report Builder

A free application you install on a local computer that you use to

generate pixel-perfect paginated reports in the same form as SQL ServerReporting Services For example, if you want to build something toautomate invoice generation or create long lists of data for distribution,you could do that here

Power BI Report Server on premises

If, for security reasons, you cannot publish reports to the Power BI

service, your IT team may put a version of that software on an internalserver behind the company firewall using on-premises computing

resources, as opposed to cloud resources Power BI Report Server is notalways in feature parity with the Power BI service That’s because

Report Server is updated only three times a year (January, May, andSeptember) It’s also worth noting that if you are going to deploy reports

to Report Server on prem, you will need to use a special version of

Power BI Desktop that is in alignment with the version of Report Serverinstalled

Power BI Embedded

Allows you to integrate Power BI reports and visuals into applications

or websites This has its own pricing and licensing structure

Now that the whole family has been introduced, we’ll shift focus to the twocomponents pertinent to this book, Power BI Desktop and Power BI

service

Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop is software that allows you to connect, transform, andvisualize data Let’s dig into some details Power BI Desktop comprises itsown components The two that are most important to a Power BI beginnerare the Power BI canvas and Power Query, so those are the two we’re going

to focus on Essentially, this is where you’ll spend the most time in yourPower BI Desktop work

The Power BI canvas is the place where you build visualizations Think of

the canvas as a PowerPoint slide for your data Here you’ll use drop functionality to pull information into different visualizations to exploreyour data and garner insights This is also where you’ll apply formatting tovisuals, add images and text boxes, and more

drag-and-Power Query is used to import and manipulate data, essentially shaping it.

In Power BI, unlike Excel, for example, you do not edit cells of data; you manipulate columns of data by using its functions, wizards, and formulas.

Power Query provides options for creating custom columns based on rulesyou design It lets you combine multiple tables of data or add values fromone table to another

Everything in Power Query first begins with getting data from your sources,and Power Query supports a huge number of data sources You want toconnect to a database? SQL? Oracle? Teradata? Power Query has you

covered You want to connect to an Excel workbook to get a table? No

problem Comma-separated values (CSV)? Easy Cloud sources? Also not aproblem

Microsoft has gone out of its way to create new connectors to data sources

to show that Power BI is not just to be used with other Microsoft productsbut wherever your data lives If you become sufficiently talented at M (theprogramming language of Power Query), you can even, in theory, createyour own custom data connectors to data sources that aren’t officially

supported Just note that this book isn’t going to discuss M or advancedData Analysis Expressions (DAX) topics or actual programming We’rehere to help you as a Power BI beginner, and you’ll do just fine withoutthose

The Power BI Service

Now we get to the good stuff that’s going to move you from an ordinaryperson who just produces reports to a celebrity whose reports draw peoplefrom far and wide The Power BI service, the online SaaS solution, allowsusers to share their reports from Power BI Desktop with other users in theirorganization

Everyone has access to their own personal workspace for free You get onepersonal workspace that is pregenerated when you log in for the first time,and it’s like a private development space in the larger Power BI serviceenvironment You technically can share things from this personal

workspace, but it’s not a best practice to do so, and anyone you share it withwould still need the appropriate licensing to view it

The right way to share reports with other users is to create a new workspaceand invite them to that workspace To be eligible to be invited to a

workspace, a user must have a Power BI Pro license, or your organizationmust be using Power BI Premium dedicated capacity to share reports withusers who do not have Power BI Pro licenses

The Power BI service lets other end users explore reports you’ve created toget insights from your work This exploration can take the form of

dashboards of curated visuals you put together Or it can be access to areport you’ve created with all its pages Or it can even be the ability to ask

natural language questions using the Q&A feature to get insights from thedata.

The Power BI service also includes several other features, such as the

ability to create special objects known as dataflows These dataflows can be

used to get information in the Power BI service outside of a database, whileallowing end users to access that data and combine it with other data inside

a Power BI Desktop model

Developers can manage deployment pipelines for workspaces in the Power

BI service, which lets you create and manage the development, test, andproduction workspaces Deployment pipelines enable ongoing developmentwork on Power BI projects, without impacting the user experience for itemsalready being used by end users

A new feature in the Power BI service gives users the ability to create goals.The goals are tracked using data in the Power BI service Information onthe goals can then be shared with appropriate users for quick, actionableinsight

In sum, the Power BI service is the critical glue that makes Power BI

different from, say, simply sharing an Excel workbook around the office Itcreates a shared space enabling people to see the same insights securely,while inviting them to explore shared data elements that can be curated formeeting the specific needs of each end user

The Power Platform

Now let’s take a step back and look at the big picture: what are the “Power”products within the Microsoft family? The Power Platform is a larger

compilation of low- or no-code products that support one another, withPower BI as just one component While we won’t train you on these otheritems, it’s good to know what else is out there in case you develop a need tointegrate one of the products into your Power BI reports in the future:

Power Apps

A low- or no-code development environment where you can developyour own applications to solve different business challenges

Power Automate

A framework that allows end users to create “flows” that automate

organizational processes

Power Virtual Agents

A no-code tool that lets you build chatbots to engage with customersand employees

Each of the components can be used by Power BI to create insights to helppush your work forward Let’s go through some examples of how eachpiece could work with Power BI

In Power Apps, for instance, you could have an application that would

allow a site inspector to take notes and upload that data to a SQL Serverdatabase A Power BI report could also be connected to that SQL Serverdatabase, download that information that was uploaded by the Power App,and update the report based on the new data being added by the numerousinspectors in the field using Power Apps

Let’s say your boss, for whatever reason, wants to see a static version of areport every day Well, you could manually go into the Power BI serviceand create an export, download it, write up an email, and click Send

Instead, a more efficient option would be to use Power Automate to create aflow that would automate the task for you, ensuring that at 8 a.m sharpevery day there’s a nice PDF in your boss’s inbox with the most up-to-dateversion of your Power BI report If that doesn’t get you points, I don’t know

what will.

When it comes to virtual agents (software that provides customer service tohumans, mimicking a customer service representative), a large amount ofdata is collected in the process whenever end users interact with your

chatbots All that data is collected and stored, which means Power BI cangenerate reports about it This creates an end-to-end reporting solution thatallows your organization to get textual insights into what your consumersare really looking for from your organization The end users can work withand see the actual data.

How Did We Get to Power BI?

Microsoft’s history in business intelligence is long and storied In manyways, Power BI is the most recent (and maybe final) chapter, representingthe culmination of business intelligence capabilities developed in a series ofcomponents Microsoft built throughout the years For you to get the mostout of this product, it’s worth discussing how Microsoft’s business

intelligence stack got to Power BI and what that journey means for you as

SQL Server: Microsoft’s Relational Database

In 1989, Microsoft released its first relational database in the form of SQL

Server for OS/2 A database is a piece of software that contains and

organizes large portions of data for different uses While SQL Server wasthe first step (and a necessary one) for Microsoft to move into businessintelligence, a database alone isn’t sufficient to provide business

intelligence

SQL Server Analysis Services Multidimensional: One Small Step into BI

As processing power grew, new methods to process data became popular—for example, data cubes In 1998, Microsoft released its first online

analytical processing (OLAP) engine and called it OLAP Services, which

would eventually become SQL Server Analysis Services OLAP Services is

a fancy way to say a cube-based way to interact with data for analysis Thecube approach dominated many enterprise BI environments for well over adecade

SQL Server Reporting Services: Pixel-Perfect Reporting, Automated Reports, and More

Microsoft eventually needed to add a pixel-perfect reporting option to SQLServer This was required because, as data use cases grew, the need to createreusable assets to an exact specification grew as well For example, youwant to make sure that every invoice you print is in exactly the same formatevery time

In 2004, Microsoft released SQL Server Reporting Services as an add-on toSQL Server 2000, with its second version being released alongside SQLServer 2005 SQL Server Reporting Services had several features that wereuseful in an enterprise deployment, including pixel-perfect report

generation, automated report distribution, and, in many deployments, theability for end users to generate queries to the backend SQL Server

database through a user interface

Excel: A Self-Service BI Tool

Every piece of software mentioned so far is what we would define as

enterprise business intelligence tools These expensive tools required large

teams to manage and deploy them

If enterprise business intelligence is defined by its large deployments and

high levels of investment, self-service business intelligence is the ability to

use and manipulate data in such a way that you empower the end user toexplore and analyze the data they have

Microsoft’s history in self-service business intelligence comes down to onecore product that almost everyone has seen or touched once: MicrosoftExcel The first version of Excel came out for the Macintosh in 1985 At itscore, Excel is a product that allows you to take data, pull it into a “flat”extract, and manipulate it or make impromptu calculations on it as needed.Excel empowered end users to take their data and get insights out of it.That’s the premise of self-service business intelligence.

Important New Functionality That Leads to Power BI

Around this time, we began to see enterprise and self-service business

intelligence start to flow together In SQL Server 2012, Microsoft released a

new feature with Analysis Services called the tabular model Analysis

Services could now support a method of data organization more like that of

a classic data warehouse, as opposed to a cube structure that becomes

increasingly difficult to manage over time and tends to be more confusingfor end users The difference was that to get performance gains in this

tabular model, Microsoft developed its first columnar (column-based) data

store technology Eventually, this would become what we know as VertiPaq

today, the in-memory columnar data store Analysis Services tabular model

So basically, with these improvements, performance became really fast

Alongside this process, a new formula language called DAX was developed

to support these tabular models that allowed for calculations across those

columns of data to help make that data actionable.

The next version of Power Pivot released with Excel 2013 used this engine

as the base for its work

Power BI Desktop Is Born

On July 24, 2015, the first generally available version of Power BI Desktopwas released to the world Inside Power BI Desktop was an entire

enterprise-level semantic (designed to be understood by people) modelingtool with the VertiPaq engine and the DAX formula language It used PowerQuery to get information from a wide variety of sources and pull it into theengine, and it allowed for transformations that could shape that data forfuture analysis

Figure 1-1 shows the timeline of the Microsoft business intelligence tracksand how they converge, highlighting some of the milestones over the last 30years in both enterprise and self-service business intelligence

No one will quiz you on this history, but hopefully it has given you theperspective to understand how we got here I mean, sure…not all of us keephistory books on Microsoft on our bookshelves, but not all of us have secretshrines to Satya Nadella either It’s a life choice

This Power BI timeline shows the evolution of business intelligence

from Excel to present-day Power BI Desktop

Figure 1-1 This Power BI timeline shows the evolution of business intelligence from Excel to

present-day Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop Under the Hood

Power BI Desktop works because under the hood it has two powerful

engines These are what make the whole thing work on a technical level.There’s the formula engine, which takes data requests, processes them, andgenerates a query plan for execution Then there’s the storage engine, whichstores the data of the data model and pulls the data requested by the formulaengine to satisfy a query’s demand

Another way to look at it is to think of the formula engine as the brain Itfigures out the best way to approach a problem and sends the appropriatework order to the right parts of the body to get it done The storage engine

is the body that receives those commands and does the work of getting allthe data together

VertiPaq: The Storage Engine

Let’s meet the storage engine of SQL Server Analysis Services tabularmodels, called VertiPaq This enterprise-level semantic modeling tool isincluded with every copy of Power BI Desktop When you pull data intoPower BI Desktop, the VertiPaq engine reads the data source post-

transformation and puts the data into a columnar structure This division ofthe data allows for faster queries via selective column selection and datacompression as entire columns get compressed This compression of thedata significantly cuts the file size compared to what it would be otherwise

It then puts the entirety of the data model in local memory This view can

be refreshed from the original data sources

Now, before you get excited and run out to celebrate, know that this datastorage engine comes with a significant hurdle for users coming from, say,Excel You cannot modify individual cells of data As the data is convertedinto columns for storage and indexed and then compressed, the data insidethe model becomes effectively immutable You can add calculated columnsand measures, but the underlying data doesn’t change If you want to

change the data, you must either go back to the transformation step of thedata (say, in Power Query) or go back to the data source and make youredits there, and then refresh your data

DAX: The Formula Engine

Also, let’s discuss the formula engine and its language, DAX DAX is aformula language used in Analysis Services Tabular, Power BI, and PowerPivot When you want to access the data in your data model, DAX is howit’s done This is done in the same way as someone would write SQL to get

data from a database Power BI users will most commonly use DAX tocreate measures and calculated columns The wonderful thing about Power

BI is that for simple drag-and-drop functionality, or when visuals get

created, Power BI generates the DAX for you and passes it to the internalengine to have its query plan generated and executed

Nothing you do in Power BI is done without DAX You may not see it, butit’s always there, playing the pivotal role of figuring out how best to get theinformation from your data model to satisfy your request

What Makes Power BI Different from Its

2, which shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business

Intelligence Platforms for 2021

Now, whatever you think about the position of the competitors on the

analysis, the sheer number of them can be enough to make your head spin.Each competitor has a reason they’re in the market today Notice, though,that the leader’s quadrant contains only three players: Qlik, Tableau, andMicrosoft

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence

Platforms

Figure 1-2 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms

The real source of differentiation between Microsoft and its competitors inthis space is the ability to execute on its plan for its software Microsoft has

a more than 30-year history in business intelligence, and SQL Server isitself now over 30 years old Microsoft has been in this game a very longtime and has the highest number of supporting technologies to its businessintelligence platform, as compared to the others

All these major competitors offer products that allow you to take data andturn it into great data visualizations that help you learn something you

didn’t know from your data I will forever be jealous of Tableau’s capability

to click and drag for groupings, for instance

Regardless of Tableau’s dazzle, Power BI offers a tool for data ingestionthat is unequaled in terms of ease of use for nontechnical resources in

Power Query It also has one of the strongest, if not the strongest, analysis

engines on the planet today in the form of Analysis Services Tabular Thesetools have accelerated the rate of data democratization inside many

organizations Power BI has created citizen data analysts around the worldwho use data to do transformative work Indeed, by putting in the effort toread and digest this book, you’re taking the steps necessary to join thatcommunity!

Here are some examples The world’s leading conservation organization,the World Wide Fund for Nature, uses Power BI to share impact effectswith donors Engineers at Cummins use Power BI to do advanced capacityplanning to get engines out the door more quickly Humana leverages

Power BI to centralize and visualize data against more than 45 unique datasources across its enterprise, using Power BI as a consolidation platform forend users King’s College London uses Power BI’s artificial intelligence(AI) visuals to identify key factors that could indicate shifts in student

performance, allowing for targeted outreach to maximize the opportunitiesfor student success These are just some of the varied use cases happeningtoday on this platform

Power BI has decades of Analysis Services experience behind it, with afrontend that can now match its promise In addition, Microsoft releasesupdates for Power BI Desktop every single month with new features,

connectors, and visualizations Microsoft is committed to the Power

Platform, and it’s safe to say Microsoft will be here for the long haul When97% of the Fortune 500 agree on something, there’s probably a good

reason

Power BI at its core is more than just a desktop authorship tool It’s an

entire platform that Microsoft has been working toward for the better part

of three decades It has the unique strength of having two of the most

enterprise-tested analysis engines in the world, VertiPaq and DAX It alsohas a great tool to allow nontechnical users to get disparate data togetherand begin real analysis on that data with Power Query

Power BI Desktop is now an enterprise-level solution that is used by theworld’s largest companies, nonprofits, and even small businesses to help getinsights from their data that would have previously been impossible

With an understanding of what Power BI is, we are ready to finally open thesoftware with a clear vision about what we’ll do with it That begins withthe Report view, so get a soda, pet your dog, and let’s dive in This nextchapter will cover the user interface and how to use it

Chapter 2 The Report and Data Views

Power BI Desktop is a robust data visualization tool that allows you to takeyour data and create visualized insights from it in a variety of ways In thischapter, we’ll go over the basics of the Power BI Desktop interface,

specifically looking at the Report and Data views

This will be a detailed dive into the User Interface, so stay with me Parts ofthis chapter might be a bit dry since I’m going to concentrate on what the

UI does, not necessarily on how we’ll use it

A majority of our focus will be on the Report view because that’s whereyou’ll be working the most Plus, the Report view has the largest number ofelements to interact with The two most important things you need to knowabout within the UI are the functions of the Home tab of the ribbon and theVisualizations pane, so keep that in mind as you read

Microsoft said its goal for Power BI Desktop was to make it “PowerPointfor your data.” As of the writing of this book, you can see that Power BI hasadopted many design principles from other tools in the Microsoft Officefamily, PowerPoint included

If you’ve used any other Microsoft Office product since 2010, you’ve seensome version of the ribbon UI in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other

products Having that familiarity with the interface gives you an advantage,but the Power BI user interface does have some quirks Now and then,

you’ll see that Power BI will add and remove items from the ribbon based

on item selection context, which can feel awkward at first

Let’s look at how Power BI integrates the ribbon and show you the firstthing you’ll see when you open Power BI Desktop See Figure 2-1

Figure 2-1 This is the first thing you see when you open Power BI Desktop

Looking at the view selector in Figure 2-1, we see three possible views: theReport view, the Data view, and the Model view

Report View: Home Section of the Ribbon

Power BI defaults to the Report view when you open it You can see aclassic ribbon interface at the top that allows you to search for actions youmight take On the right, you’ll see the pane portion of the UI This part isvery similar to what Microsoft did with the original Xbox 360 interface.You can add different panes to see by using the View portion of the ribbon.You can also take panes that are currently visible and minimize them, asyou can see with the Filters and Fields panes in Figure 2-1 where the

Visualizations pane is open

At the bottom, you’ll see the Report Page Navigation options You can clickindividual report pages or, if your report is large, you can use the arrows toscroll across your list of pages, very similar to how you would explore

worksheets in Excel Finally, on the left, you’ll see the three icons that

indicate the view selector The views in order from top to bottom are

Report, Data, and Model The ribbon menu changes based on which viewyou are in

Starting with the ribbon interface, the default view is the Home tab, as seen

in Figure 2-2 The Home tab goes by a few names, including Home view,Home ribbon, and Home section I’ll refer to its parts (Home, Insert,

Modeling) as tabs moving forward.

Figure 2-2 The Home tab, also called the Home ribbon, Home view, or Home section, is Power BI

Desktop’s default view

All of the tabs, or main ribbon sections, in Figure 2-2 are divided into

subsections separated by a faint vertical line The names of the subsections

are on the bottom row of the ribbon In Figure 2-2, the subsections are

Clipboard, Data, Queries, Insert, Calculations, Sensitivity, and Share Sowhen I refer to a “subsection” of a tab moving forward, look down at thatbottom row to see what I’m referring to

(I realize that if you’ve been alive for the last couple of decades and usedany Microsoft Office product, you already know this, but I just want tomake sure we’re aligned on what I mean when I refer to a “subsection” of atab.) After I identify the tab and the subsection, I’ll get into the buttons.

The Clipboard Subsection

So let’s get back to the Home tab You’ll first see the Clipboard subsectionwith items for your standard Cut, Copy, and Paste functionalities You canuse Format Painter to apply one visual’s formatting to another, just as youwould if you were using format painting in Excel or PowerPoint

The Data Subsection

In the next subsection, the Data subsection, you’ll see several fast options toquickly connect to different data sources We can see these more clearly in

Figure 2-3

Figure 2-3 The Data subsection allows you to choose where you get the data

Starting on the left, you see the “Get data” button, which has an icon and adrop-down arrow If you click the icon, you’ll see a new menu appear withthe entire list of possible data connectors in Power BI, as shown in

Figure 2-4

Figure 2-4 Here’s a look at the full Get Data window for when you need the whole enchilada,

meaning the entire list of data connectors

If you click the drop-down button, you’ll see a smaller, truncated list ofmore commonly used data sources This can be very convenient when youdon’t need to access the full list of connectors The truncated list is shown

in Figure 2-5

Figure 2-5 The quick data selection list is a shorter list of data connectors, for when you’re having a

“classic” for lunch

The “Excel workbook” button will immediately open an Explorer window

to navigate to your Excel file Click the “Power BI datasets” button, and awindow will appear so you can select a dataset that is already published inthe Power BI service to connect to via a “live connection.” For reference,see the window in the example in Figure 2-6

Figure 2-6 Connecting to a dataset already in the Power BI service

If you click the SQL Server button, a pop-up menu will appear for you toenter the server’s name or address, along with an optional database name.The server will ask for your credentials when you try to connect

You’ll also see an option for selecting Import or DirectQuery In Importmode, you download the data into your local data model In DirectQuerymode, Power BI generates queries against the database and then, when thatdata is returned, does whatever is needed with the data That window isshown in Figure 2-7

There is also an “Advanced options” button you can click that will allowyou to add a command timeout in minutes, pass a custom SQL statement,include relationship columns, navigate using full hierarchies, and enableSQL Server failover support

Figure 2-7 Connecting to your friendly neighborhood SQL Server

The “Enter data” button (way back in Figure 2-3) will give you a0n

interface that should feel familiar if you use Excel, as it opens a table-likestructure where you can add columns, name them, and put data into cells, asshown in Figure 2-8 It’s important to note that this interface has no formulafunction It’s only for simple data entry You can copy and paste

information into this window, as well, but be careful before going paste crazy

copy-This window can be useful for testing or if you have a lookup table that youwant to generate for your model But I recommend that you do not put largeamounts of information into this type of table structure because it has to bemanually managed and has a maximum capacity of 3,000 cells’ worth ofdata

Figure 2-8 A simple data entry window, for when you need a little extra something you don’t have

elsewhere

The Dataverse button seen back in Figure 2-3 will generate a pop-up forentering your environment domain information alongside a prompt If

you’re familiar with Microsoft Dynamics, you might have heard this

referred to previously as the Common Data Model The window for

providing your Dataverse information is shown in Figure 2-9

Figure 2-9 If you are in the Dynamics 365 universe, you’ll probably connect to Microsoft Dataverse

The “Recent sources” button (Figure 2-3) will open a drop-down menu ofyour most recent sources so that if you must connect to a data source again,it’s conveniently already there for you You can click More from the drop-down to get an even longer list of recent data sources Figure 2-10 showssome of my mos000t recent data sources in Power BI.

Figure 2-10 My “Recent sources list” (ignore Skynet )

The Queries Subsection

Moving 00on to the Queries subsection, you’ll see two buttons: “Transformdata” and Refresh Refresh is grayed out in Figure 2-11 because I have nodata in my model to refresh However, when that button is available andclicked, it will do a complete refresh of all data sources in your data model

“Transform data” has two separate functions, depending on whether youclick the its icon or its drop-down arrow If you click the icon, it takes you

straight to the Power Query interface, which we’ll discuss in more detail in

Chapter 3

If you click the drop-down arrow, you’ll get a drop-down menu with acouple of options “Data source settings” takes you to a pop-up to modifythose settings for things like credentials or locations of files and the like Ifyou have parameters and variables, they can be modified here as well

00

Figure 2-11 “Transform data” options

The Insert Subsection

Next is the Insert tab, which has three options You can insert a new visualonto your report page, insert a text box, or add more visualizations to yourlist of visualizations in the Visualizations pane

If you click “New visual,” a visual will be put onto your canvas The

default visual that will be placed on the canvas is the stacked column chart.The “Text box” button will put a text box onto your canvas in the same way

it would appear in PowerPoint

The “More visuals” button, when clicked, will look like Figure 2-12 If youselect “From my files,” you’ll be directed to an Explorer window, whereyou can select a visual to add from a file on your local machine These files

are usually in PBVIZ format, though in recent years Microsoft has reallypushed AppSource as the preferred method to get custom visuals.

Figure 2-12 Adding visuals from two possible sources

If you select From AppSource, you’ll see the window shown in Figure

2-13 Here you can select a third-party visualization to add to your list ofvisualizations